Graduate Courses

This seminar examines the current state of the field of Chinese and Sinophone studies from different geographical and theoretical perspectives. It is a research seminar and colloquium, and we use texts in the original as well as translated languages. Topics vary.

From the new form of literary theory taking shape in romanticism to recent German Media Studies, this course examines the relation of close readings of singular texts to larger theoretical claims. We will reflect on the eminent status that literary readings have attained for broader theoretical and philosophical projects. We will specifically focus on a certain theoretical milieu in which far reaching theoretical claims were not merely exemplified or illustrated by, but in fact developed from distinct practices of (close) reading of particular literary texts. The aim is to analyze this distinct type of theory by investigating the scenes of reading that major theoretical endeavors depended upon, in order to trace the trajectory of theory and turn to more recent theoretical endeavors, to discuss the changed status that reading has for them. Among the authors we will read are Schlegel, Benjamin, de Man, Derrida, Blumenberg, Butler, Kittler, Latour.

Dissertation preparation course

This graduate seminar examines the variety of artistic, cultural, historical, and literary representations of black Africans and their descendants—both enslaved and free—across the vast stretches of the Luso-Hispanic world and the United States. Taking a chronological frame, the course begins its study of Blackness in medieval and early modern Iberia and its colonial kingdoms. From there, we examine the status of Blackness conceptually and ideologically in Asia, the Caribbean, Mexico, and South America. Toward the end of the semester, we concentrate on black Africans by focusing on Equatorial Guinea, sub-Saharan African immigration in present-day Portugal and Spain, and the politics of Afro-Latinx culture and its identity politics in the United States. Throughout the term, we interrogate the following topics in order to guide our class discussions and readings: bondage and enslavement, fugitivity and maroonage, animal imageries and human-animal studies, geography and maps, Black Feminism and Black Queer Studies, material and visual cultures (e.g., beauty ads, clothing, cosmetics, food, Blackface performance, royal portraiture, reality TV, and music videos), the Inquisition and African diasporic religions, and dispossession and immigration. Our challenging task remains the following: to see how Blackness conceptually and experientially is subversively fluid and performative, yet deceptive and paradoxical. This course will be taught in English, with all materials available in the original (English, Portuguese, Spanish) and in English translation.

Examining marginal writing in manuscripts and printed books from the Middle Ages and the early modern period, we interrogate the productive relations between law and culture. We focus on a wide array of sources from the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediterranean. Likewise, we consider different legal systems.

This course is an approach to a cultural history of the Inquisition from its inception and methods, to its theories and practices, to its abolition—although, has it ever been totally abolished? We read literary and nonliterary texts about heresy, the Antichrist, auto de fé, religious protest, and magic and witchcraft.

This seminar introduces students to two centuries of Latin American political thought in the form of social and literary essays produced since the times of independence. It aims at studying how Latin American writers have thought of their identity and how they have theorized the political/ cultural heritage of the colony. The seminar starts with the Haitian constitution and contemporary Haitian authors that assess the legacy of the Haitian revolution. It ends with writings on current indigenous movements across the region. Its first unit engages nineteenth century debates over “American identity” that were foundational to the newly constituted nation-states (authors include Bolívar, Lastarria, Alamán, Martí, Sarmiento, Echeverría, Montalvo). Its second unit explores twentieth century debates over cultural independence, the movement of “indigenismo”;  mestizaje, transculturation and heterogeneity, the Caribbean movement of “negritude,” the  metaphor of “cannibalism” to account for the cultural politics of the region, concepts such as “internal colonialism” and “motley society,” and the polemics over the region’s capitalist modernity and post-modernity (authors include Rodó, Da Cunha, Ortiz, Moreno Frajinals, Lezama Lima, Vasconcelos, Reyes, De Andrade,  González Prada, Mariátegui, Antenor Orrego, Zapata, J.L. Borges, J.M. Arguedas, Sergio Buarque de Holanda, Caio Pardo Junior, Jean Price Mars, Jacques Roumain, Aimé Césaire, George Lamming, C.L.R. James, Fanon, Léon Damas, Paulo Freire, Angel Rama, Retamar, Edmundo O’ Gorman, Antonio Candido, Darcy Ribeiro). Its third unit explores recent debates over indigenous cosmologies, coloniality and other ways of knowing (authors include Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, León Portilla, R. Kusch, René Zavaleta Mercado, A. Quijano, Bolivar Echeverría, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Viveiros de Castro). There will be an extra session on the tradition of Latin American feminist thought, depending on the interests of the group.

The seminar’s weekly sessions will be conducted in Spanish. Most of the readings will be Spanish, French, and Portuguese materials (with a few Anglo-Caribbean sources). Students will be provided with English translations, if they prefer them, and will be allowed to write their papers in English. 

In this course we study different kinds of narratives about the end of times and its consequences in Iberian and Latin American cultures. We include political, theological, social, and environmental narratives across periodizations in Iberian and Latin American cultures.

This seminar suggests a research project to investigate the affinity between the legal discipline and the science of the soul, or, if you wish, between the science of the soul and the body of law. The point of departure for our framing argument—the existence of this affinity—is that at different moments in history, the legal science (in the form of legal scholarship, religious law, or even legislation) has toiled to appropriate cognitive processes (the external senses, for instance) and post-sensorial operations (imagination, fantasy, memory, etc.). However, this appropriation has become, at different moments in history, so naturalized, so dissolved, so automatized, that it has become invisible for us, and that, because of this invisibility, the affinity can continue doing a political work that is not always evident to us readers, citizens, and clients of the law. In this seminar we read Iberian and Mediterranean primary sources from different confessions, in different languages, and within different legal and political backgrounds—from pre-Socratic thinkers to al-Ghazali, from Averroes and Maimonides to Alfonso X, from Parisian theologians to Spinoza, etc. Likewise, we read theoretical work that allow us to conceptualize the kind of research we are doing.

This course focuses on the use of images of and in the “New World” during the first century of European exploration, conquest, and colonization in the Americas. We explore printed illustrations that shaped European perceptions of New World “exoticism” and “barbarism,” as well as indigenous pictorial manuscripts that continued and adapted native visual practices and offered alternative views of the conquest. Besides reading texts by European and indigenous authors in which images played an important role (Columbus, Las Casas, Oviedo, Staden, Léry, Raleigh, Sahagún, Guaman Poma), we study nonalphabetic visual sources such as Nahua codices and maps, and portraits and festive performances of Afro-descendants. We also examine how images of the Americas were disseminated in Europe through copied illustrations, generating clichés and stereotypes—terms originally associated with printing techniques—that contributed to the racism and colonialism that have shaped the modern world. We conclude with a discussion of examples of contemporary films that reimagine the colonial Americas.

Lisa Voigt lisa.voigt@yale.edu

This seminar brings together literary and theoretical works that chart planetary relations and connections beyond the paradigm of francophonie. Comparative focus on the poetics and politics of spaces shaped by intersecting routes of colonization and forced migrations: islands (Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Martinique), oceans (Indian, Mediterranean, Atlantic), and deserts (Sahara, Sonoran). Prerequisite: reading knowledge of French; knowledge of Arabic and Spanish invited. Conducted in English.

This seminar introduces students to theories of memory, testimony, and trauma by bringing key works on these topics into dialogue with literary texts by writers of the former French and British empires in Africa. Literary readings may include works by Djebar, Ouologuem, Farès, Salih, Head, Aidoo. Theoretical readings by Arendt, Adorno and Horkheimer, Agamben, Césaire, Derrida, Fanon, Foucault, Mbembe, Spivak.